Good Morning Friends. I spent most of the weekend playing Path of Exile, or at least the part of the weekend I was functional. I ended up getting some generic crud that started on Wednesday and then knocked me out of commission for most of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It was only on Sunday that I started to feel much better and even now I am not feeling amazing. We took a number of covid tests throughout this so we are pretty certain it is not that. My wife started getting sick on Friday, so whatever it appears to be contagious but the strange thing is… I was not really around anyone for the last two weeks.
I think since we last talked I have finished the main campaign of Path of Exile and my Explosive Arrow Champion is now level 73. I’ve begun dipping my toes into maps and I have to say… I feel super freaking squishy right now. I think the core problem I am having with Path of Exile is that the gear is nowhere near as straightforward as my beloved Diablo III. I know in D3 that in order to make X build work I need these ten items in these specific slots. The collection of specific items grants me the ability to get progress further with the build, and subsequent fine-tuning and acquiring better versions of said items… also then make the build more efficient. I understand none of these levers in Path of Exile. My gear is effectively a pile of stats that I do not fully understand the interactions with, and as such I do not know how to make myself feel less squishy.
In part, due to this sudden friction… and also in part because I have not felt well enough to engage with my friend Grace who is also at the maps phase… I have been spending some time trying other classes. I have a mess of a character that I built without a guide that mostly works but it is also deeply inefficient, and then I have the Inquisitor that I am building towards Righteous Fire. One thing of note… for whatever reason at the time of writing this POE Vault seems to be down so that link may or may not work. Wintertide Brand is ridiculously fun and does some really dumb things. Essentially I cast this spell and it spreads throughout the map of NPCs and kills them with a frost disease sort of thing. The only problem here is that wintertide brand is not the final form of this build, so we will see if I also like running through things while self-immolating.
I think the ultimate problem I have with Path of Exile is also one of its strengths. You have these mechanics stacked on top of other mechanics, and if you have been around you maybe learned them all individually. However today a new player trying to unpack everything is not only having to understand core concepts but also learn the remainder of thirty-seven, soon to be thirty-eight league mechanics. This means that the game has grown significantly and is constantly changing, but also has just layer after layer of madness stacked loosely on top of the layers below it. The seasoned players understand how to solve the problems that I am running into with survival, but it is much harder to grok than “equip Aquila Cuirass”. That is not to say that eventually, Path of Exile won’t feel the same to me… just that I have a large lift to get there. There are times when I feel like I need a guide to reading the guide I am trying to follow.
Ultimately I am wanting to spend the remainder of 3.18 trying to figure out what exactly I want to do for 3.19. I like Explosive Arrow just fine, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as good as the original Splitting Steel build that I ran until I could switch over to Explosive Arrow. Similarly, right now I am loving the way running around with Wintertide Brand feels, but I am concerned that I won’t enjoy the final Righteous Fire form. I know there are pure Splitting Steel builds that exist, and pure Brand builds that exist, so I might also create some characters along those play styles at some point. Essentially my time spent in Path of Exile is more or less preparing for August when the new league starts. Ultimately we won’t know what 3.19 looks like until the live stream on August 4th, and at that point, I will probably consume a flurry of information and try and pick a path to go down then.
PoE has a lot of issues with getting reasonable survivability at endgame. This is especially true this league, as they just reworked rare mobs to give them all Archnemesis modifiers, which are substantially more lethal than the old rare mob modifiers used to be. Virtually every single type of defense has one or more “backdoors” which various rare mobs will target, meaning that you’re almost always at high risk of dying almost instantly. (Don’t ask me why GGG likes to design things this way. I don’t know.)
Broadly speaking, there’s a few things that can help. The first is to make sure that all of your items have a decent life bonus on them (ideally you would want a T1 life modifier, but even T3 is helpful). Once you get up to 4k life you’ll feel a bit safer, although 6-7k is where you stop being as much at risk for one-shots.
The second is to get your chaos resistance up. This is typically somewhat expensive, since chaos resistance is kinda rare and doesn’t come in as large amounts as elemental resists, but it makes a big difference, since there’s so many Archnemesis modifiers that give enemies extra chaos damage.
The third is only an option for some builds, but the combination of Melding of the Flesh and Aegis Aurora is very popular. Melding of the Flesh makes it so that all of your maximum elemental resistances are based on your highest maximum resist (but also gives a big penalty to all three resists), while Aegis Aurora gives +5% to maximum cold resistance. Combine that with the Purity of Ice aura and it’s not too hard to get your max cold resist to the hardcap of 90%, which means that all of your elemantal resists cap at 90%. That drastically reduces your elemental damage compared to having just 75% resistance.
I tend to stick to builds that have really high armor and life (or ES), like Righteous Fire. Bow builds tend to be squishier since they can’t use shields.
To add on to this, a good build will generally have multiple layers of defenses. My righteous fire build has the high life/es and regen that come with the build, but also throws in determination and a banner to achieve some really high armor as well. It still suffers from magic, which is probably the most often thing to die to. Max block builds are probably the absolute best line of defense, particularly paired with Aegis Auroro (as mentioned).
The archnemesis change has generally been not well received. For whatever reason GGG seems to continue to make the game content harder every patch cycle which just alienates the more casual players I feel. As it stands I have not done a single end game boss for any of the leagues in ages and the furthest I ever made it against the core bosses was Uber Elder and Sirus the Awakener, back before they really shook up the Atlas. I don’t think I’ll ever do the Maven encounter because it just plain sucks. Then there’s whatever new uber bosses are. The price of gearing past a certain point gets so exponentially high that casual players just get priced out of some end game content.